The invention generally relates to wireless communication systems. In particular, the invention relates to joint detection of multiple user signals in a wireless communication system.
FIG. 1 is an illustration of a wireless communication system 10. The communication system 10 has base stations 121 to 125 which communicate with user equipments (UEs) 141 to 143. Each base station 121 has an associated operational area where it communicates with UEs 141 to 143 in its operational area.
In some communication systems, such as code division multiple access (CDMA) and time division duplex using code division multiple access (TDD/CDMA), multiple communications are sent over the same frequency spectrum. These communications are typically differentiated by their chip code sequences. To more efficiently use the frequency spectrum, TDD/CDMA communication systems use repeating frames divided into time slots for communication. A communication sent in such a system will have one or multiple associated chip codes and time slots assigned to it based on the communication's bandwidth.
Since multiple communications may be sent in the same frequency spectrum and at the same time, a receiver in such a system must distinguish between the multiple communications. One approach to detecting such signals is matched filtering. In matched filtering, a communication sent with a single code is detected. Other communications are treated as interference. To detect multiple codes, a respective number of matched filters are used. Another approach is successive interference cancellation (SIC). In SIC, one communication is detected and the contribution of that communication is subtracted from the received signal for use in detecting the next communication.
In some situations, it is desirable to be able to detect multiple communications simultaneously in order to improve performance. Detecting multiple communications simultaneously is referred to as joint detection. Some joint detectors use Cholesky decomposition to perform a minimum mean square error (MMSE) detection and zero-forcing block equalizers (ZF-BLEs). These detectors have a high complexity requiring extensive receiver resources.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have alternate approaches to multi-user detection.